Reminiscing about nvmax.com

What was nVmax?

nVmax was created back in 1998 by Andrew Charnley. nVmax was originally an overclocking tool for nvidia graphics cards. nvmax.com was launched in the latter part of 1998 as a place to download the program and for users to give feedback, test and request help for the program.

What started out as a forum, nvmax quickly grew in to a large community. With an increasing number of users came the opportunity to expand the website and for Andrew to develop the program further.

What happened next?

Andrew and I had a chat about nvmax.com and how far it would be possible to take it, we had already started out converting the site over in to an early content-management-system which Andrew had created from scratch and begun to review hardware. With the hardware reviews becoming popular, I set out to start branching in to the gaming side of things and quickly set up a whole gaming element to the website with daily news, previews and reviews of games from the biggest publishers and developers around the world.

I worked very closely with Ubisoft, THQ, EA, Blizzard, idsoftware and Bethesda to mention just a few in getting the latest news and quite possibly some reviews in place to get the nvmax reader base higher. The website hits started rising and all was going good until we ran head first into a series of 3 server crashes, it did knock us but we managed to come back stronger every time and our readers and users of the nvmax program were still there.

The nVmax competition!?

As with everything in life when you start getting big you end up making rivals and in our eyes there were many. nvnews, although we worked with them quite closely at the time of nvmax being live were probably in the number one spot followed closely by neowin.net (they’re pretty big now, Grrr) and guru3d were also up there somewhere near the top spot.

Understandably if you stay around and have a strong reader base and look to the future the possibilities are endless. neowin.net has exploded in growth since nvmax.com was up and running. Hats off to them, they did everything right and one of our old editorial writers is now over there working for them.

What happened to nVmax?

We were young is the simple answer. Both Andrew and myself didn’t know how big it could have been, we still talk about it to this day about how we could have expanded on what we had from an older point of view. In today’s world the possibilities would have been endless and I could see us being there in the same capacity that neowin are now.

It has been 6 years since nvmax finally went offline and the domain name was bought by an investment company I think who went after high profile, high traffic domain names. It’s a shame that it happened as it would have been nice to stay in some kind of control over the website.

What does the future hold?

I can’t see nVmax springing back to life in any capacity. It would take too long to build the contact list back up again and to pry away if at all possible the readership that neowin, nvnews and guru3d have. It would literally be starting from scratch all over again.

I will not say never though, let’s just wait and see. nVmax still has a permanent place in my heart.